Re-appraisals come and go these days. Many are worthy, although some revolve around licensing deals that ensure hard-to-find titles are again soon out of print (don't start me on downloading here) so we remain stuck with an ailing 'industry' where many essential back catalogues are either poorly represented or in danger of being forgotten altogether.
Thus – and not for the first time – this writer thanks himself for Domino's vigilance in ensuring that many precious back catalogues are back in the land of the living. Any sane music fan should be over the moon that they've already given us back landmark albums by the likes of Josef K, Sebadoh, The Feelies and more, but for this writer, a real swell of happiness rushes through his veins due to the opportunity to write about The Triffids once again.
Domino have really got the behind this amazing band's back catalogue. They've already issued expanded versions of the Western Australian group's studio albums from 1983's 'Treeless Plain' through to their 1989 swansong 'The Black Swan' and a whopping 8-CD box set is currently being readied featuring all the band's semi-official cassette releases, plus a wealth of live material and further rarities from the vault. So, with all this healthy retrospective activity going on, this is as good a time as any for a handy 'Best of' Triffids compendium, right?
Right. Enter the generously-appointed 18-track career overview collection 'Wide Open Road'. It is indeed one of those great 'does what it says on the tin' collections which rounds up many of the legendary band's finest songs under one roof. Its' track selection will inevitably provoke differences of opinion amongst the faithful about what's been omitted and what should have made the cut and this writer would certainly have loved 'Chicken Killer', 'Old Ghostrider' and of course 'Field of Glass' to have been included, but really we should concentrate on being truly thankful that this is here at all.
Besides, when you consider the embarrassment of riches on offer here, such trifles seem wholly irrelevant. Hell, 'Wide Open Road”s opening clutch of tracks features wonders like the slow-burning tension and release of 'Hell of a Summer', the shimmering cinematic hurt of the title track and the baroque brilliance of 'Red Pony' which – even as early as 1983 – showed just how much scope and ambition was already contained within David McComb's singular song-writing vision.
Each of the band's official albums is fairly represented. From 'Raining Pleasure' (1984) we get Jill Birt's dusty, Mo Tucker-style title song and the thuggish psychosis of 'Property is Condemned'. From the classic 'Born Sandy Devotional' (1985) we get 'Wide Open Road', the show-stopping 'Stolen Property', the gloriously tragic sweep of 'The Seabirds' and the seemingly eternal brooding blackness of 'Lonely Stretch' where the premise of driving through an unfamiliar territory at night reaches a level of murderous obsessiveness (“I pointed her nose through a crack in the door/ fingering my silver St. Christopher and saving my empty shells for her”) that's rarely been so vividly realised in 'Pop' music.
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Ardent fans may also quibble that we get only 'Kathy Knows' from the 'back to basics' 1986 wool shed recordings that spawned the 'In The Pines'' album, but McComb's dramatic, widescreen song-writing reached arguably its' apex on the big budget, major label-funded 'Calenture' (1987). From this one, we get the epic 'Bury Me Deep In Love', a great pure pop moment with 'Trick of the Light' and an inspired choice: 'Jerdacuttup Man', which is surely the greatest ever written from the point of view of a dead man killed and heaved into a peat bog.
This writer personally has mixed feelings about the Triffs' final album, 'The Black Swan', but thankfully the selections here largely bypass the songs featuring drum machines and the more experimental, 'dance' direction that album flirts with, at least on the arid, steel-drenched 'Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think' or the wryly-observed 'New Years Greetings'.
'Wide Open Road”s major selling point for long-term Triffids addicts is the inclusion of two lesser-known early tunes. The strident and confident 'Beautiful Waste' this writer remembers from an obscure compilation, though 'Reverie' is untried to these ears and a charmingly naïve thing of wonder it is too.
Us Triffids fans tend to be of the obsessive variety, so the chances are most long-term admirers will already have most of 'Wide Open Road', not least since Domino's diligent re-issue programme kicked in a couple of years back. However, while this compilation provides the handy compendium long-term fans are always keen on, its' role as a dynamite introduction for the uninitiated is its' primary force. If you're reading this and you've never heard The Triffids, well what are you waiting for? You've got one of THE great back catalogues in modern music to get acquainted with.
The Triffids official site
Domino Records online
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